#deep focus

I am noticing a lot of these videos popping up in my feed. I guess my complaints about those hard light videos made the algorithm decide I should be inundated with "modern movies suck" content.

They follow the same basic formula of "old = good" and "new = bad."

And if you watch them with only a surface level understanding of filmmaking and photography and how to author visuals, you will probably go, "Wow, what an amazing video!"

I get why people like these essays. And I understand there are genuine frustrations with how many modern movies are made.

And the video does have some interesting philosophical filmmaking explanations. I really enjoyed those aspects.

But there is something in the very thumbnail of this video that completely invalidates the overall premise.

The Premise: Old movies look more "real" than new movies.

The Evidence: Comparing one of the greatest movies of all time (Jaws), by one of the greatest directors of all time (Spielberg), to a franchise soft reboot cash grab.

Why not compare to Sinners? Why not compare to Weapons? Or Dune? Or The Brutalist?

Also, is realism always the goal?

What about Spider-Verse and KPop Demon Hunters? Does their unreality make them lesser?

This is how they bait you with these videos. They want you to buy into their nostalgic cherry picking. They don't elevate any modern films that look amazing. They pick their favorite movies from years ago and then compare them to the worst examples in the recent past.

But the thing I dislike the most is that problems are often blamed on artists. If artists were more competent and went back to the old school ways, movies would look better and more real.

Use hard lighting. Use practical effects. Use deep focus. Show and don't tell.

Individual quick fixes are never going to solve a systemic problem.

I assure you that directors and all of the artists involved in making movies would love to use every tool in the toolbox. They haven't forgotten these techniques. But most of the time these tools are not compatible with hyper-efficient filmmaking processes.

I liked his explanation of haptic visuals. To create artistic, textural scenes to help the world of the movie feel more lived in and real. That's a cool concept. But adding a few haptic scenes into Jurassic World isn't going to fix the story. It isn't going to improve the weak script. Hard lighting and deep focus aren't going to fix the systems that produce these risk-averse reboots of profitable IPs. It isn't going to fix the rushed, fix-it-in-post mentality that doesn't give CG artists enough time and resources to produce more realistic imagery.

But also, has he seen a Vince Gilligan show?

Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and now Pluribus have some amazing haptic visuals. It seems like he is ignoring more modern examples to sell the story that things were "better" in the distant past.

This hurts the filmmakers who are creating legitimately beautiful work. And it also ignores the fact that bad, ugly movies have always existed.

Jaws was released in 1975.

Of the 216 movies released that year, I have seen a total of 5.

Only 5 movies from that year stood the test of time. 211 movies are completely ignored when assessing how real and aesthetically pleasing movies used to look.

That is textbook survivorship bias.

Have you seen the classic 1975 cinematic masterpiece... The Happy Hooker?

Let's compare the visuals of The Happy Hooker to Sinners.

It's not a fair fight.

But when you compare Jaws to Sinners...

You can see the quality is not dependent on when the movies are made. It is dependent on a director with a strong vision and a large team of artists who are passionate about their craft.

If you have to resort to this level of nostalgic cherry picking to prove your point, I don't think your argument is very strong.

── 𝒪𝓅𝓊𝓁𝑒𝓃𝓉 𝒩𝑜𝒾𝓇: 𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝑀𝒾𝒹𝓃𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉 𝒮𝑒𝓈𝓈𝒾𝑜𝓃𝓈

Welcome to the inner sanctum of the midnight hours.

If you are looking for a sanctuary to escape the noise of the daylight, the doors to our empty Art Deco lounge are always open. "Opulent Noir" is a curated sonic journey designed specifically for those who find comfort in the shadows.

⌲ The Elements of the Night:

The Sound: Slow-tempo (60 BPM) Dark Noir Jazz, featuring the haunting echoes of a solo tenor saxophone and minimalist brushed drums.

The Vibe: Mysterious, elite, profoundly elegant, and drenched in rain-slicked nostalgia.

The Purpose: A perfect backdrop for deep focus, creative writing, late-night dark academia study, or the introspective process of shadow work.

“Step inside, find your corner in the silence, and let the darkness reveal what the daylight hides.”

If your soul feels at home in these smoky, dimly lit corners, consider this your invitation to return to our nocturnal community. Pour yourself a drink, light a candle, and let the music guide your deepest contemplations.

When Roman Polanski cites a film as his favourite, it is worth examining not just the narrative, but the architecture of the image. In Odd Man Out (1947), director Carol Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker constructed a Belfast that exists somewhere between documentary realism and expressionist nightmare. While Reed’s later collaboration with Krasker on The Third Man (1949) is rightfully celebrated for its zither-scored, tilted-angle Viennese paranoia, Odd Man Out is the more audacious technical achievement. It is a film where the camera does not merely observe a man’s physical deterioration but becomes the physical manifestation of his fractured psyche. Central to understanding its visual language is recognizing the shadow of a cinematic giant: Gregg Toland.

By 1947, Gregg Toland was the most revered cinematographer in Hollywood, fresh off his revolutionary deep-focus work in Citizen Kane (1941) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Toland’s philosophy was one of radical inclusion—using wide-angle lenses, immense depth of field, and complex lighting to force the viewer to engage with the entirety of the frame, suggesting that a character’s environment was as psychologically significant as their face. Robert Krasker, an Australian working in Britain, absorbed this Toland-esque grammar but inverted its purpose. Where Toland used deep focus to democratize space (allowing the foreground and background to compete for meaning), Krasker used it to isolate.

Odd Man Out follows Johnny McQueen (James Mason), a wounded Irish nationalist, staggering through the snow-covered streets of Belfast after a botched robbery. Krasker’s cinematography is the engine of the film’s existential dread. From the opening shot, he establishes a city that is a labyrinth. Working with Reed, Krasker employs the Toland trademarks: the aggressive use of wide-angle lenses that distort space and the relentless deep focus that keeps Johnny’s tormenters sharp in the background while his own face looms, desperate, in the foreground.

Yet, Krasker’s genius lies in how he adapts Toland’s techniques for the noir idiom. Toland’s deep focus was about clarity and the overwhelming weight of reality; Krasker’s deep focus is about the impossibility of escape. In the film’s most stunning sequences—particularly the harrowing scene in the abandoned tenement where Johnny is hidden by the artist Lukey (Robert Newton)—Krasker uses depth of field to create a visual metaphor for the soul’s fragmentation. Johnny lies in the foreground, fading in and out of consciousness, while Lukey obsessively paints him in the background. Krasker keeps both planes in razor-sharp focus simultaneously. We are forced to witness the commodification of Johnny’s suffering while Johnny himself slips away. It is a Toland-esque frame, but the emotional effect is uniquely Kraskerian: claustrophobic rather than liberating.

The influence of Toland is most palpable in Krasker’s lighting design. Toland revolutionized the use of “practical” light sources (lamps, windows) to motivate shadows. In Odd Man Out, light is never neutral. It is a character with malevolent intent. Krasker lights Belfast as a series of harsh, geometric traps. The shadows aren’t just noirish atmosphere; they are bars on a cage. As Johnny stumbles from the kindness of strangers (the barmaid, the drunk, the prostitute) to the cruelty of others, Krasker uses the high-contrast chiaroscuro that Toland perfected to delineate moral ambiguity. Notice how the police, when they appear, are often silhouettes—figures of implacable authority rather than men. Notice how Kathleen Ryan’s character, the devoted Kathleen, seems to carry her own source of light in a sea of oppressive darkness, a rare visual reprieve that recalls the angelic framing Toland used for women in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath.

However, Krasker diverges from Toland in his use of the camera’s mobility. Toland, working with Orson Welles, favored long takes that allowed actors to move through the deep space he created. Krasker, in Odd Man Out, utilizes a restless, searching camera. Early in the film, the camera moves with the gang as they case the mill; later, it lurches and sways with the wounded Johnny. This is not the static, objective deep focus of Toland; it is a subjective, hallucinatory deep focus. Krasker’s lens becomes a surrogate for Johnny’s fading consciousness. The wide-angle distortions (faces bulging, corridors stretching into infinity) are Toland’s technical vocabulary applied to a psychological purpose Toland rarely explored. Krasker makes the world itself look sick.

The film’s climax, set in the snow-covered dockyard, serves as a thesis statement for Krasker’s interpretation of Toland’s legacy. Reed and Krasker stage the finale with a spatial clarity that Toland would have admired, yet the environment—stark white snow against pitch-black shadows—feels less like reality and more like a Beckettian stage. The camera pulls back to a wide, deep-focus master shot as Johnny and Kathleen meet their fate. We see the police, the priests, the crowd, and the two lovers in the same frame. It is objective, cold, and geometrically precise. In this moment, Krasker proves he has mastered Toland’s ability to orchestrate space, but he uses that mastery to underscore a bleak, fatalistic worldview that is purely his own.

The steady rhythm of rain against the library windows, the smell of old paper, and the silence of a university long after hours. 🌧️📚

A 25-minute Pomodoro session designed for deep focus. No music, just the immersive sounds of a rainy afternoon in the archives. No distractions.